Grant Propoal: Track your Investments with Sia

Grants Approved
1

Introduction

Project Name:

Track your investments with Sia

Name of the organization or individual submitting the proposal:

Shubham Palriwala

Describe your project.

WebApp where one can track their daily/weekly/monthly P&Ls of Investments such as Stocks, Crypto, Mutual Funds, ETFs, Metal, etc! We also build our own public-facing API for the community to build different kinds of frontends if they need, for example, a CLI, TUI, Desktop App, Mobile App, etc!

We will be using multiple price aggregators along with end to end encryption of the data we store in our Sia renters so that the data batches also do not have any PII available with them. The portfolio data and the user accounts data will be stored at Sia hosters using the Sia CLI or the SDK based on the tech stack we (devs I work with) intend to build this on. This would allow anybody who wants to track their investments in a single place without having to manage multiple apps/platforms with their data staying meaningful only when its with them.

For users who want more ownership, we’d provide complete self hosting options so that they have it on their infra.

How does the projected outcome serve the Foundation’s mission of user-owned data?

As a privacy freak who likes to dip their hands in multiple investment options such as stocks, crypto, liquid assets etc, I always struggled to have a monitor for my investments at one place since I did not find a platform that provided all of this without taking the ownership my data. This is where the power of Sia and user-owned data kicks in and will result into something big.

Grant Specifics

Timeline: 3 Months

Budget: 9550 USD

  • Domain (to be decided) for 3 years: 100 USD * 3
  • Freelance UI/UX Designer: 1500 USD per month for 2 months for understanding the current UX flaws in the space and building the UI
  • Freelance Web Developer: 1000 USD per month for 2 months for building the UI
  • My salary (Backend Developer): 1000 USD per month for 3 months
  • Landing Page: 750 USD
  • Hosting and Deployment: 500 USD

Approach:

The work of the Backend and Design will kick-off in parallel. While the UX research is underway for the UI, I will start with the API development with the basic features and then extending as per the designer’s feedback. We’ll also use a traditional DB to map the file hashes with the user for quicker fetching on the client side.

For the API, I plan to aggregate multiple portfolio providers and then use an integral mathematical average clearing out the outliers, so that the app does not depend on any one aggregator of market.

For the design, I’d like to keep it minimal and aesthetic for making it as a habit to the user and increasing adoption.

Then, the next month, the frontend and the UI developer work together to get the UI ready.

The last month, we handle the integration between the frontend and the backend and the documentation of our work and apps for the community to use and contribute to.

OKRs to Monitor Project Progress

Objective 1: Solidify Project Features and Architectural Blueprint by the End of Month 1

  • Key Result (KR) 1.1: Execute comprehensive UX research to identify current flaws and understand essential feature requirements from the frequent investment app users.
  • KR 1.2: Engage in collaborative discussions to finalize feature sets and initiate wireframing for the UI.
  • KR 1.3: Design a high-level architecture for the API, ensuring scalability and robustness.
  • KR 1.4: Determine the optimal technology stack and architectural framework for the frontend, considering future adaptability and integration capabilities.

Objective 2: Build the UI Designs into Functional Interfaces by the End of Month 2

  • KR 2.1: Conclude the high-fidelity design phase, ensuring alignment with user expectations and industry standards.
  • KR 2.2: Synchronize UI development efforts with the minor high-fidelity changes to ensure consistency and functional coherence.
  • KR 2.3: Accomplish API endpoint development with comprehensive testing of corner cases.

Objective 3: Integrate Components and Launch by the End of Month 3

  • KR 3.1: Design and unveil a captivating landing page (using Framer or Motion for quick turnaround time)
  • KR 3.2: Facilitate the seamless integration of the frontend interface with the backend API, ensuring real-time responsiveness and reliability.
  • KR 3.3: Release the design systems through an accessible Figma file
  • KR 3.4: Document the UI and API repositories culminating in a v1.0 release that signifies project completion and readiness for user adoption.

What are the goals of this small grant?

The goal is to create an end-user application that allows users to view all their investments across multiple investment opportunities in a single place. Documentation for self hosting the application, maintaining the open sourced repo and pushing bug fixes.

Potential risks that will affect the outcome of the project: We will be using the official Sia SDK/ Sia CLI so it has minimal dependencies hence it directly depends on the uptime of our network.

Development Information

Will all of your project’s code be open-source?

Yes. 100%

Leave a link where code will be accessible for review.

It will be a new repo under my GitHub username: ShubhamPalriwala (Shubham Palriwala) · GitHub

Do you agree to submit monthly progress reports?

Yes

Contact info

Email: spalriwalau@gmail.com

About Me:

I am Shubham Palriwala. I graduated from university this year in the field of Computer Science and Engineering with a Specialization in Information Security. I have been an Open Source contributor since the past 3 years now and have been part of various Open Source programs such as:

  • Mentee at the Skynet Summer Developer Program
  • Mentee under Amiti Uttarwar of the Inaugural Summer of Bitcoin
  • Mentee at Kyverno of the CNCF LFX Mentorship Program
  • Substrate Builder as a Mentee in the GitHub Externship
  • Mentee at OWASP Juice Shop under Google Summer of Code
  • Mentee at OpenMined under Google Season of Documentation
  • Mentor at OWASP Juice Shop under Google Summer of Code

Apart from this, currently, I’m a Maintainer at Komiser (3.7k Github Stars), Formbricks (3.3k Github Stars), Juice Shop (8.8k Github stars).

I also worked as a Software Engineer at Cisco for the last 6 months but had to leave them since it wasn’t aligning with my goals of being able to actively contribute to the open source space.

I am also a winner of multiple international hackathons such as:

  • Best Infrastructure at the MIT Bitcoin Hack 2022
  • Top 10 in the Postman API Hack 2022
  • Runners Up in IvyHacks 2021

Any other preferred contact methods: Discord laalshaitaan

2

Well… The way I see it is that Sia isn’t really for investing. It’s just Monopoly money to pay for storage. I don’t this this proposal makes sense.

3

Hey, thanks a lot for your reply! I think I wasn’t exactly able to explain here! What I mean here is that, with Sia and decentralised data storage, people can track their investments (they have made in the past through whatever platform and currency) without worrying about a third party who’s owning their data and potentially making money out of it.

If you still feel it’s still not fitting in for you, let me know, and I’d like to understand your points and work on them to make the project better!

Edit: I’ve updated the proposal with a more clear name

4

Hello @laalshaitaan,

Thanks for your proposal! The committee has reviewed your grant request and has some concerns they would like to see addressed in this proposal.

  • How is the data being stored? Does each user need to run their own Sia node?
  • Is all data required to be input manually, or will there be links to existing financial/banking institutions?

Should you decide to make these updates to your proposal, the committee will re-review.

Thank you,
Kino on behalf of the Sia Foundation and Grants Committee

5

Edited to make it more clear:

Hey, regarding the input, yes it would be manual to avoid linking and potential vulnerability issues that come to us with linking to other third party wallets/connections.

But we will provide auto complete and suggestions to make the UX intuitive! The live tracking of prices will be dependent on multiple third party trackers.

Regd the data storage:

For the hosted version on the domain, the user does not need to host a node as i’ll run an instance for it,

For the self hosting, I will try to make it work without a user wanting to host a Sia node, but if that becomes not so feasible, I’ll write a one click shell script / docker compose whatever seems the best after discussing with the community and the solutions they have in mind!

UX will be the highest priority at any instant! But I will be going through a lot of tech iterations when the design process will start in parallel !

6

Hello @laalshaitaan,

Thanks for your proposal! The committee has voted to conditionally approve your proposal provided that the marketing budget is removed from the request. The Foundation is hesitant to provide marketing funds for projects that haven’t been built yet, and we’re still speaking with our lawyers to determine under what guidelines offering marketing funds as part of grants is reasonable.

If you agree, please update your proposal to remove the marketing funds and let us know that you’ve done that as a new response to this thread. Thanks again!

Regards,
Kino on behalf of the Sia Foundation and Grants Committee

7

Hey, thanks for the conditonal approval :) ! I hope, by the term the project is ready, we’ll hopfully be able to plan the Marketing too :crossed_fingers:

Anyways, updated the proposal! Looking forward

8

Thanks for the response @laalshaitaan! Since you’ve removed the marketing component, we’re happy to fully approve your proposal! We’ll reach out via email to get you set up.

9

Progress Report

Hey, apologies for the delay in the progress report! Was ooo, here’s the report!

  • What progress was made on your grant this month?

    • The UI/UX of the Portal is complete
    • The frontend is about 75% done for the laptop view
    • The Backend as an MVP for the Portal is built

  • Links to repos worked on this month:

  • What will you be working on this month?

    • Initiate Sia integration & get out of Postgres wherever possible
    • Expose & Document Backend API for Third Party integrations
    • Make frontend responsive
    • Buy a Domain Name & start branding the page with our app & mention Sia too

Will share the link here once the hosted MVP is live for everyone to give feedback & suggestions to improve :crossed_fingers:

1 Like
10

Hello @laalshaitaan,

Thank you for your perfect progress report!

Regards,
Kino on behalf of the Sia Foundation and Grants Committee

11

Hi @laalshaitaan, please make your repo public. This is a requirement of the program, but the linked repo appears to be private. Thanks!

12

apologies, its public now and will stay this way! will share the progress report in a couple of days with a shareable link :)

13

Progress Report

Hey, apologies for the delay in the progress report! Was waiting to get a sharable link :smile:, here’s the report!

  • What progress was made on your grant this month?
    • Jaayedaad is our brand name, means Assets of an individual in English.
    • The Landing Page is live: https://jaayedaad.com (PS: Don’t try the signup/claim username now, its awaiting a fix)
    • The Portal is 90% complete, we’re just handling corner cases when a user wants to use Postgres or a Sia Node (PS: We wanted to give our self hosting users this customisation option), our cloud hosted app uses Sia & Postgres both for the initial few months to make sure we do not lose any data.
    • We have a renterd node running that encrypts per user data stores it accordingly currently on the zen testnet.
  • Links to repos worked on this month:
  • What will you be working on this month?
    • Optimise the code, there’s a lot of scope of improvement that frontend dev wrote which I rewrote last week, same will be continued this week as well.
    • In Depth Testing of the platform & Asset Valuation calculation revisiting
    • Start rolling out invites for our Sia community and some friends and family to test and help with some feedback

PS: The next report will be the final one hopefully :crossed_fingers:, I have exciting plans with the app and will discuss with the committee post the wrap up of this beta & initial grant!

1 Like
14

Final Progress Report

  • What progress was made on your grant this month?

    • Jaayedaad launched its public waitlist & Invite only phase publicly!
    • Around 15 folks from the Sia discord have enrolled so thanks a ton for your support on this!
    • We’re currently at over 200 users waitlisted to use the product with literally 0 marketing or social media presence.
    • With the current accepted 100 users on the platform, we’re often hitting rate limits of our third party APIs hence the UX isn’t as smooth but will fix this over this week.
    • With the help of @parox on building the Sia JS package, we’ve moved all the download functionality to use the js package. The upload methods will be integrated as well once the js package exposes methods for it! This helps us keep the codebase clean, thanks again.
    • Performance optimisations & UI fixes for mobile view
    • Better query results using match scoring on API results
    • Added another third party API to remove dependency on a single one
    • Gaining a ton of feedback from our early users to plan out the next steps. (An interesting one was to move away from Google OAuth & building Account Abstraction for direct auth, which to me sounds like a unique case to be built on top of Sia)

  • Links to repos worked on this month:

  • We’re and will be live https://jaayedaad.com

Would love to the get the committee’s feedback on this grant and how could this be improved + what they think of the next steps for the product!

I’d again like to thank them & the team for giving me & my team the chance to build and get involved with Sia and learn so much!

15

Hello @laalshaitaan,

Thank you for your progress report and congratulations!

The team will reach out to you with additional information about the wind-down of your grant.

Regards,
Kino on behalf of the Sia Foundation and Grants Committee